Almost everyone on the boat is a Swedish laborer, looking for work. Farmers have turned out to inspect them as if they were cattle.

One by one, the men are hired, until finally only Lasse and Pelle are left. Nobody wants to hire Lasse (Max von Sydow). He is too old. He has a son. Half-drunk and defiant, he all but forces himself on the last of the farmers, a man named Kongstrup who has a shifty look about him.

Lasse and Pelle sit in the farmer’s cart as it passes through fields on its way to their futures.

“Pelle the Conqueror” uses this beginning, full of hope and dreams, in an interesting way. Through the seasons that follow during a long year on the Kongstrup farm, the vision somehow stays alive inside Pelle, even though life seems organized to disappoint him. The film begins with one hopeful immigration - Sweden to Denmark - and ends with another, Pelle’s decision to take his chances in the larger world.

Life on the Kongstrup farm is defined by the land, the seasons, and the personalities of the people who live there. The Kongstrups themselves hardly appear for long stretches of time; they live in a big house set aside from the farm buildings, and Mrs. Kongstrup spends her days drinking brandy while her husband chases wenches. He has no shame, not even about the one unfortunate woman who appears at his front door from time to time, their child in her arms.

In the quarters where the laborers live, life is defined by the sadism of the “Manager” (Erik Paaske), a bully who spots weaknesses in his men and exploits them. He is assisted in his cruelty by the “Trainee,” a youth who takes particular pleasure in tormenting Pelle.

The boy turns to his father for protection, but Lasse is too old and too weary to help. Eventually Pelle makes his own alliances for friendship and protection.

“Pelle the Conqueror,” which won the Grand Prix at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, was adapted by Bille August, whose previous film, “Twist and Shout,” was about teenagers coming of age in the 1960s. In tone and sometimes in visuals, the movie resembles “The Emigrants” and “The New Land” (1974), Jan Troell’s two-part epic about Scandinavians who settled in Minnesota. Both films star Max von Sydow, that mighty oak of Swedish cinema, who is unsurpassed at the difficult challenge of appearing not to act, of appearing to be simple and true even in scenes of great complexity.

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